Jim decided to share the story of how his daughter was groomed and abducted by paedophiles, in order to help other children and parents.

“Her mother and I divorced when Lucy was five. Her mother has some serious health issues, so Lucy has lived with me, almost exclusively, for 6 years. We are very close and there is a lot of love, laughter and music in our home. She’s my little Princess.

We live in a small, rural town. It’s quiet and nothing much happens. I thought it was a safe place to raise my little girl.

I don’t want to say what I do or where I work.

I was aware of paedophiles and grooming, obviously, but I never thought it would happen to my little girl.

I thought she was safe here, with me.

I was wrong.

Looking back, I was extremely naive, which is why…

Last Sunday I took Kate to the optician. It was one of those days where the sky burns blue, and wisps of cloud drift over every now and then just to keep things interesting. The boys went to the green to play football, and we went for an eye test.

As I watched Kate answer the opticians questions – can you read these letters, these tiny ones, are they clearer on red or green? – I suddenly caught myself and gave a little laugh. I was watching her and smiling at her earnest six year old eager-to-please face. I was so in love with how she was trying her hardest to understand what was being asked of her, and sometimes, very sweetly, getting it wrong.

And that’s why I laughed at myself; because I realised that there was nowhere else I’d rather be in the whole world than sitting in a dark room on a beautiful sunny day, watching my daughter talk, smile, and just be entirely herself at 6 years, 11 months, and 3 days.

I think that’s what being a parent does; it makes of us spinners of dust into purest gold. Children turn the most humdrum moments into something that you want to gather to your chest, and begin quilting into your memories immediately.

The mothers and fathers and grandparents and sisters and brothers in Manchester have those moments too; stacks of them, armfuls of them, more than they can carry, but none that they’ll ever be willing to let go of. Their hearts and lives are full up to the very brim with love, teasing, music, laughter, homework, chip shop chips on a Friday night, bickering at the kitchen table, tidy-your-room-or-you’re-not-going-anywhere, watching their children at the optician and being enchanted moments.

Those families had everything and they still have much to sustain them. You weren’t human enough to realise that there are very many things that you can’t take away, no matter what you do. You can’t erase the hundreds of mornings of watching the sunrise together, surrounded by emptied bottles of milk and soggy bibs. You can’t take away the thousands of times you read The Gruffalo and never got bored of doing the voices. You never understood that towering cathedrals are built on shared lives, that love is capable of building spirals that soar up into the air, far above the dirt, fear and jealousy that kept you tethered to earth.

You – you had nothing. Your heart was never full of love; you never learned that it’s those tiny moments that that make your heart grow fat and heavy with the delicious weight of the life that you’ve built up around you. Your heart was no more than a casing for the bitterness you dragged around with you, no more full of humanity than the balled-up tinfoil that my cat bats around the kitchen floor. Any memories your family had of you are ruined, gone, erased – or stuffed down the back of the sofa where no-one has to look at you ever again.

In the last two years I’ve argued, fought, voted, cajoled, and blinked in rigid disbelief through two referenda that didn’t go my way. So I know how you feel today.

The day after the Scottish referendum, I cried. I drove along the streets of my hometown and they felt different – alien, uncomfortable, unsettled, and no longer mine. I looked at everyone I passed, as they looked at me, for shared signs that we were the disappointed, disbelieving 45%. I’ve never sat in a pub before which was completely silent, but that night we did, and it was awful.

The day after Brexit, I remember Dave and I standing in the street, smoking furiously, feeling like aliens in our own birthplace once again. What is this country we live in? Who the hell are we sharing it with? What must the rest of the world think of us now, this tiny nation being submerged by racism, fear and I’m-alright-Jack-ness?

So I know how you feel. And I can tell you what to do. Just breathe through it. Do what’s right despite knowing that doing the wrong thing gets you far further in life (I’m looking at you Farage, Johnson, Trump, you poor downtrodden outside-the-establishment, banging on the windows of power, upper-class, privileged white males who want to win just because they can).

That’s shit advice, and I’m sorry, but here’s the thing: it’s not getting better any time soon.

Welcome to the club of embarrassment, shame, and knowing that the world is looking at you and seeing something that you never believed to be there, but is actually just next door, in your street, in your coffee shop, and in your office.

I’m not tired of getting up in the night because other people need to use the bathroom. I’m not tired of tying shoelaces, wiping faces and pairing hundreds of tiny socks, all while being interrogated by two small but relentless torturers. And I’m not even tired of the exhaustingly perennial clutter.

Well, I am, of course, tired of all of those things. But you know what I’m even more tired of?

Talking about it.

For decades, centuries, millennia, the stories of women have been routinely swept under the rug, shut out of mainstream media, consigned to the ‘no further interest’ file.

Appropriating space

But social media has somewhat shifted that; now women’s stories are everywhere. Women are sharing, collaborating, arguing, talking about what the Tories are doing to the most vulnerable in our society, how to Mumsnet the fuck out of a chicken, and counting dead women.

And I love that; I love that we’re appropriating space whereas once upon a time we had none. I love that we’re taking control of conversations, publicly, and not just in our living rooms. I love that the minutiae of women’s lives are suddenly of interest – from what it feels like to run a meeting on no sleep, to how it feels when someone grabs your arse in the street, to how annoying it is to be halfway through a blog when your three year old spills porridge all over the kitchen floor. Excuse me.

The motherhood blogerati

And yet, I also find myself getting a bit bored of the conversation. There are what feels like 77 billion blogs by mothers floating around out there, from the earnest to the honest. We talk amongst ourselves endlessly about motherhood; what it’s like to be a working mother, a stay at home mother, a mother of boys, of girls, of both, of kids with challenges, extraordinary talents and everything in between.

But now that women’s opinions and feelings and passions are out in the light, I find myself a little disappointed that what we’re talking about so much is…ourselves. Or, more accurately, ourselves as mothers. Perhaps this is just the ‘Caitlin Moran’ stage of working out what it is we want to talk about, to shout about, to discuss. According to Moran…

‘(Women have) had to spend years kind of patting ourselves like we’ve just recovered from an explosion and going, are we okay? And once we’ve established that we’re okay, then it’s like, well what do we want to do?’

And when you’re on the receiving end of great deluges of this type of over-analysed drivel, it becomes possible to think of mothers as a group of people struggling with a uniquely difficult and specific set of problems. And of course, some of us are.

However, given that over half of US women between 15 and 44 have had children, it’s actually, for most of us (dare I say it) a completely normal experience. One that is, variously, hard, boring, tiring, stressful and wonderful. Often, motherhood is wallpaper; it’s the constant background, the spine that runs through life while lots of other things are going on.

And now, like Caitlin Moran asks, I want to know what’s next, for all of us?

I’ve got lots of things I want to do. One of them is being a good mother to my children. The other 47395 have nothing to do with my children. Maybe one day I’ll write about some of those other things.

On a freezing cold December night, what I really wanted was a long hot bath, preferably with something good to read and maybe something to nibble while I was in there.

Having read all of my books at least five times, I went to the local shop for a magazine, something I do rarely – and when I started reading the titles of the articles, I remembered why.

Cosmo was the worst offender, with an article called something like ‘Ladies – how to tame a player’ which I won’t go into right now, as I can see from here that your heads have already exploded with rage and you don’t need further goading. There was also a delightful piece called ‘How passion turns sane girls psycho‘ but my fingers physically refuse to get into that one – there’s not enough time for the angry typing that would ensue if I went there.Read More »

In 1986 I got a job with the Manpower Services Commission. I worked in the old orange Jobcentres with the bubbly writing and the psychedelic chairs. My job was to find other people a job. By the time i worked there people no longer HAD to visit the Jobcentres, they went because that was where jobs were advertised.Through the years I moved onto be the ex-offenders officer, the Disablement Resettlement Officer, the Ex-Regs officer, the overseas workers officer – all these posts were about giving specialist help to certain people to help them find jobs.

I then became a Restart Interviewer- late 80s – loads of people out of work and I did 60 interviews a week to get through them all. This also meant new rules and new targets – stricter benefits regime targets – SBR. For the first time we could stop someone’s benefits for not Actively Seeking…

The first time I held your hand was the day after you were born – the first full day of your life. I think. If I’m honest, I was drugged up to the eyeballs, attached to a catheter and half-crazed with exhaustion on your first day, and I struggle to remember all of the details. I do remember a nurse sticking a massive needle right into my thigh muscle without warning, and rolling her eyes when I cried out in pain –that, I remember.

But back to you. Truthfully, I was a little bit scared of you. You weighed less than eight pounds, smelled like strawberries, and had the tiniest pout I’d ever seen, but at the same time you were the human equivalent of a nuclear bomb that had just gone off in the centre of my life (and other places, but let’s not think about that right now.)

So, Day Two. Your Dad had gone home, laden with bags of washing, to get the house ready for us. You were in your little plastic box, blinking and stretching. I contemplated you from my bed. What was I supposed to do with you? You didn’t seem to want anything in particular. But in that moment I recognised the need to take control of what was beginning to seem like an overwhelming new life, so I lifted you up, sat back and rested you on my chest.

I said your name, over and over, until it really felt like yours. It’s a strange thing, naming a human, and I needed to embed it, both in your heart and mine. And so we just lay there together, quietly sowing the little seeds of your life, and of my life as a mother. I rested my finger in the curled up palm of your hand, pink and delicate as seashells, and you grabbed it.

Looking right into your eyes, I actually gasped – I remember it still – and I felt the connection that I had been evading since the moment you arrived. We held hands, that first time, and it meant everything to me.

We’ve held hands a million times now. Taking your first steps. Walking on the beach. Holding you up as you skate around the garden, always landing on your bum with a shout. Walking the hospital corridor with you after you’d been to visit your new baby brother. Every day. Going to the shops. It’s nothing special, but it’s forever special.

And so tomorrow, I’ll take your hand again, and walk you to school. School! When you were a baby I’d stand outside those gates, watching the mothers of giant children in bedraggled uniform, and look forward to your turn.

Now it’s here, I’m so full of pride that my throat feels like it might burst. I’m so full of sadness that you’re not that tiny baby any more, looking to me for everything you could ever need. I’m so full of excitement for everything you’re about to learn. I’ll hold your hand if you’ll hold mine, and that’s how it’s always been.